Sybase, Inc., an SAP company (NYSE: SAP) and industry leader in enterprise and mobile software, today announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.7. Sybase ASE 15.7 provides a cost-efficient relational database management system (RDBMS) for managing very large data sets for the most demanding applications. ASE 15.7, with its new advanced compression capabilities, allows large data volumes to be stored more compactly and reduces I/O times, enabling today’s top enterprises to handle more transactions and support more concurrent users without adding the cost of more disks and hardware. Today’s announcement was made at Sybase TechWave, collocated with SAP TechEd 2011 and being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from September 12-16.

“Sybase has made significant enhancements to optimize data storage and increase developer productivity in ASE 15.7,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, IDC. “These new features should strengthen ASE’s already impressive total cost of ownership.”

The feature-rich Sybase ASE 15.7 release significantly builds on the ASE 15x product line, providing the optimal platform for SAP Business Suite. As a result, ASE 15.7 not only provides a powerful database platform for SAP customers, but also allows existing Sybase ASE customers to easily adopt the new features and optimizations without the need for a database upgrade.

Enterprises require a database system that allows them to easily scale the amount of users and data without breaking the budget, while guaranteeing dependability. ASE 15.7 delivers business critical performance using compression algorithms in the database to expand and contract data automatically. This enables users to use less disk space to store the same amount of data and to retrieve that information from disks as much as four times faster.

“The explosive rate at which enterprise data is increasing is placing additional challenges on database administration requirements,” said Brian Vink, vice president of Database Products at Sybase, an SAP company. “Customers need a database that remains easy to manage even in the face of continual system growth. The enhancements introduced in ASE 15.7, provide improved performance, increased reliability and reduced cost for managing the large data volumes being seen in today’s mission-critical transactional systems.”

ASE 15.7 further reduces cost of operations by simplifying administration and enhancing system security, providing a database manager that remains easy to manage while protecting against intrusion. ASE 15.7’s online operations and extended diagnostic features increase data availability, optimize the data for application performance and quickly pinpoint bottlenecks to speed performance. Strong password encryption and single login profiles protect the database from unauthorized external access attempts and make it easier to manage large numbers of users.

Enterprise software developers want database management systems that support a wide variety of development strategies and languages to allow them to use the technologies with which they are most comfortable. Sybase ASE 15.7 speeds application development and ensures performance of applications out of the box with support for scripting languages. These new application technologies will make it easier for developers and independent software vendor (ISV) partners to leverage the capabilities in ASE that reduce cost and work in their preferred language directly without losing performance.

Partner reactions to ASE 15.7 release have been positive:
• “Red Hat sees data proliferation as an industry trend that forces innovation in order to meet customer demands,” said Gus Robertson, vice president of Business Development at Red Hat. “With our strong partnership and engineering collaboration, customers can be assured that Sybase ASE runs seamlessly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
• “In order to keep pace with business demands, organizations require a powerful mission-critical solution that can handle increasing volumes of data without incurring downtime,” said Lorraine Bartlett, vice president, Worldwide Marketing and Strategy, Business Critical Systems, HP. “HP’s mission-critical Converged Infrastructure running Sybase ASE for HP-UX or Linux offers clients an optimal platform for the most demanding data workloads.”
• “In support of our commitment to Sybase, we continue to offer an unprecedented monitoring solution, ensuring our joint customers’ databases run efficiently, consistently and with maximum uptime,” said Bradley Tashenberg, CEO, Bradmark Technologies. “By making ASE 15.7 an even more robust platform for running SAP ERP, Sybase allows DBAs to focus on more critical tasks while ensuring increased performance benefits.”
• “Industry analysts predict an increase in database market share and adoption of Sybase data management products with SAP’s acquisition of Sybase,” said Claudia Fernandez, director of Product Management, Toad Solutions at Quest Software. “By supporting the latest version of Sybase ASE with our market-leading solution, we expect strong adoption of Toad in the Sybase customer base.”

ASE 15.7 key features include:

Management of Large Datasets
• Compression— allows large databases to be stored more compactly and reduces I/O times to ensure high performance on even the largest databases.
• Reduced Query Latency— helps better handle large data sets, especially those which use dynamic SQL for interactive data retrieval.
• Replication Performance—increases the performance of Sybase’s industry-leading transaction replication and syncing technology.
• Enhancements for Parallel Hardware —improves optimization of multi-core/multi-threaded CPU architectures to get the maximum performance out of today’s latest processors

Simplified Administration
• Online Operations—increases data availability while allowing data to be optimized for application performance.
• Extended Diagnostics—allows DBAs to quickly pin-point performance bottlenecks and speed customer support requests.
• Strong Password Encryption—protects the database from external intrusion and hacking
• Single Sign-on & Login Profiles—makes it easier to manage large numbers of users and simplifies end-user access to the system
Ease of Application Development
• Efficient Management of Large Objects—inline management of large objects as well as enhanced application development features such as large objects as parameters to stored procedures.
• Enhanced Application Language Capabilities—many improved TransactSQL&™ language features to increase productivity of application developers as well as support for a variety of popular languages such as Python, PHP and Perl.
• An Enterprise-Class DB for ISV applications —enhanced business-critical performance for ISV applications out of the box, enabling ISVs to easily write and port their applications to ASE 15.7.

Sybase ASE 15.7 Availability
Sybase ASE 15.7 Enterprise Edition is scheduled to be available at the end of September 2011 on the following platforms: HP-UX 11i v3, AIX IBM Power 64-bit, Linux IBM Power 64-bit, Linux x86 64-bit, Solaris SPARC 64-bit, Solaris x86 64-bit, Windows x86 64-bit, Windows x86. For more information on ASE 15.7 visit www.sybase.com/asebuiltforbusiness.